Years of posts on the Facebook page of BIV vaporized last week. The page, with a healthy archive of thousands of business news stories over more than a decade from our communities in British Columbia, is suddenly barren.
This is due to the dispute between the federal government and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which has been gradually stripping news from it and Instagram in Canada rather than pay a tax on links to news.
We are far from alone. Many of our Glacier Media publications’ and other news organizations’ Facebook and Instagram pages are already stripped of content. Before long, it will not be possible to view news in Canada – whether created here or not – on the two social media platforms. Google is also threatening to join them.
This is due to the government’s Online News Act, Bill C-18, and the unique approach Canada is taking with the tech giants to compel compensation for news content. Problem is, neither Meta nor Google can be forced to do so. They can – and, in Meta’s case, has – cut news rather than cut cheques each time a news story appears on their platforms. Problem specifically for us is, Google and Meta deliver the majority of our digital audience to us, free of charge. If they walk away from news, our audience walks away with them if it doesn’t find alternatives to Google News, to Google Alerts, and to its search engine, and more immediately, to Facebook and Instagram.
Here are the easiest paths we’d appreciate you’d take:
Subscribe to our daily newsletters at biv.com/newsletters. They’re free, available mornings or afternoons or both on weekdays, and very shortly on weekends. They have the latest business news from BIV and Glacier and are advertiser-supported.
Subscribe to our digital and/or print journalism at biv.com/subscribe. In the next couple of weeks as our website design changes we will unfurl a new stream of content and benefits to augment our full newspaper and online journalism at attractive prices.
Add biv.com to the home screen of your cellular phone. I’m always surprised to tell people that, yes, even without a BIV app, this is possible as an app substitute. If you’re on an iPhone, open the Safari browser and go to biv.com. Tap the Share button (the box with the up-pointing arrow). Scroll down until you see the “Add to Home Screen” from the menu. If you’re on an Android device, open Chrome, Firefox or Edge browsers and select “Add to Phone” or “Add to Home Screen” prompt from the menu. You’ll then get biv.com website without having to search for it.
Add biv.com as a bookmark on your laptop or desktop. Remember when phones came along that weren’t just phones – weren’t principally really phones very much anymore? This is how we kept track of our favourite websites. Try it! You’ll feel nostalgic, maybe even younger.
Follow our accounts on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter). We will continue to post our content across those platforms because Bill C-18 doesn’t affect anything other than Meta and Google.
We remain hopeful that this dispute resolves itself. Both Meta and Google have indicated they’d be willing to enlarge an existing fund that directly compensates news organizations (our parent company is one such negotiated recipient). What they won’t accept is a link tax that has no ceiling on it.
What is evident is that this dispute is an inflection point. Other countries are bound to follow what happens here, which is why Meta and Google want no part of an unlimited tax on links that its users or its technology posts or indexes. When Australia tried this, the tech titans worked out arrangements with media organizations to avert the same sort of tax. There is no reason they can’t do the same here.
The digital traffic Meta and Google direct our way permits us to monetize our journalism with advertising, and their loss as platforms will have a profound impact – exactly the opposite of what the federal government, well-intentioned as it was, expected and argued would occur in protecting local news.
We want to make sure you know the facts about this dispute – and have access to the facts BIV and the Glacier Media chain provide through our journalism. Please write me at [email protected] if you have any questions.•
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and executive editor of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
